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The Cucumber for Java Book; PragPub for September

September 03, 2014

If you've always wanted to use Cucumber on your Java projects, now you can!

The Cucumber for Java Book starts with the same great advice from the Ruby version: how to deliver rock-solid applications collaboratively, now with all code completely rewritten in Java. New chapters cover features unique to the Java version of Cucumber, and reflect insights from the Cucumber team since the original Ruby version was published.

And a new month brings a new issue of PragPub magazine. Stay tuned next week as we announce the winners in our latest contest!

The Cucumber for Java Book

Until now it's been difficult for teams developing Java applications to learn how to benefit from Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). This book changes all that by describing in detail how to use Cucumber to harness the power of plain language specifications in your development process.

In part 1, you'll discover how to use Cucumber's Gherkin DSL to describe the behavior your customers want from the system. You'll also learn how to write Java code that interprets those plain language specifications and checks them against your application. Part 2 guides you through a worked example, using Spring, MySQL, and Jetty. Enhanced chapters teach you how to use Selenium to drive your application and handle asynchronous Ajax calls, and new chapters cover Dependency Injection (DI) and advanced techniques to help keep your test suites fast. Part 3 shows you how to integrate Cucumber with your Continuous Integration (CI) system, work with a REST web service, and even use BDD with legacy applications.

Written by the creator of Cucumber and two of its most experienced users and contributors, The Cucumber for Java Book is an authoritative guide that will give you and your team all the knowledge you need to start using Cucumber with confidence.

September PragPub Magazine

The September issue of PragPub is all about value.

One of the defining characteristics of the Agile software development movement is a focus on values. “We have come to value,” the Agile Manifesto says, “individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, [and] responding to change over following a plan.”

Arguably this focus on understanding what one values rather than mere adherence to a rigid methodology has something to do with the wide adoption of agile thinking in software development in the years since that defining Snowbird Conference.

All of the articles in this issue have to do with programming values in one form or another.

Ron Jeffries, one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, addresses value most directly in this issue by asking, what is value, anyway? As he tends to do, Ron cuts through the complexities to find the inner simplicity in the question.

Since I am writing this on the US holiday that celebrates human labor, it is especially appropriate to point out that one of the valuable assets of the company you program for is you. Your efforts, your talents, your skills, your insights, your accomplishments. In their column on your career, Johanna Rothman and Andy Lester tackle the problem of how to assess your own value as a programmer, and how to communicate that value to managers and potential employers.

We hope you find value in the rest of the articles as well.

If, like a jillion other developers, you’ve been getting in some playground time with Apple’s new Swift language, you may find Daniel Steinberg’s exploration of the value of first-order functions in Swift programming a pleasant romp. If you haven’t played around with Swift yet, you couldn’t ask for a gentler introduction.

We think there’s value, too, in knowing where we came from, and this issue contains two essays on computer history. Dan Wohlbruck continues his series on the history of programming languages with a look at the origin of Fortran. And your editor offers up a considerably less serious take on computer history with his richly annotated history of Loveless and Baggage.

Oh, and you can also download the current version of our special issue on teaching kids to code for free at the Prose Garden website. We’ve added another article to it this month.

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